What Happened at the Meeting on Friday June 23rd

Your reporter found it quite difficult to keep track of the tricks that were being performed at this meeting, because they were short items, and lots of them !  As this chain of miracles went past in a bit of a blur,  it was only possible to get down the titles of each….

The host was Al Hirschel, and the theme was “Card Tricks with a Borrowed Deck”.  He led off with the Seven Card Trick, then a Four Jacks Assembly, and lastly a Card Layout to find the chosen card. 

David Whitson did a card trick using an ESP deck.  Next he had a card chosen, then found it on a Chinese sign.

Card magician Michael Blakeman started with an item finding a chosen card, then switched a chosen card on a spectator, then did a trick called the Drunken Shuffle,  then did a trick that resembled Vernon’s “Triumph”.  Michael did a mind reading item in which he looked for the chosen card by looking into the spectator’s eyes for a “tell” when he turned over the chosen card in the series of cards.  In his last item, he found the chosen card by peeling off top and bottom cards of the pack.

The next card magician, Brad Burgoyne, also found a chosen card, then he performed an item similar to the “Drunken Shuffle”.    A hopeless mess-up of cards is transformed into order by one cut by the magician - but in the neat spread of face-up cards one is still face-down - the chosen card.

 John Ferguson performed “Handful of Aces”, and “Spectator chooses the Aces”.

The “Piano Trick” is a nice bit of mathematical magic applied to a card trick, and this was neatly done by Denis Norman.   A card  originally between the spectator's fingers magically and invisibly moves from an "Even" pile to an "Odd" pile.

A visiting magician, Craig Hardwick, had a card chosen, then “thirds” were stacked up and the “rejects” put into a spectator’s fist.  When the fist was hit, cards fell out and the chosen card only remained   -  Startling !